The review found that there were no records to confirm that Cruz had attended the three-day diversion program in 2013, after breaking the handle of a restroom faucet. And it found there were no apparent consequences if he had in fact failed to attend.

But the commission, led by Chairman Bob Gualtieri, the sheriff of Pinellas County, said the district’s handling of his offense appeared irrelevant to what happened later. Gualtieri said that even if Cruz had been arrested on the spot rather than referred to PROMISE, there would have been nothing to prevent him from buying a firearm four years later, given his status as a juvenile first-offender.

“I’m going to suggest to you that this is something we can make recommendations on, but overall, this is something we can put to rest and move on from,” he said said to the commission, which consists of law enforcement officers, public officials and parents of the murdered children.

Commission member Grady Judd, the Polk County sheriff, said he found the PROMISE program to be a permissive “train wreck” that allowed young offenders “bite after bite after bite of the apple.” But he said he agreed that the handling of one incident in Cruz’s past had no bearing on what happened at Stoneman Douglas.

The suspect was identified as Nikolas Cruz, 19, who had been expelled from the school....

“I don’t think the event in and of itself — breaking off a faucet — had anything at all to do with the shooting later on,” Judd said.

The PROMISE program had been seized on as a factor in the shooting, especially by conservatives who preferred to talk about the school district’s failures than about gun control. The discussion became particularly heated after it came out that the school district’s repeated denials that Cruz had been involved in the program were false and that he had in fact been referred to PROMISE.

But speaking to reporters during a break Tuesday, Gualtieri said a detailed look at Cruz’s involvement in the program didn’t turn up anything relevant to the events more than four years later.

“The referral of Cruz to the PROMISE program is inconsequential, as far as this commission is concerned because the evidence is the PROMISE program had no bearing on the outcome, no bearing on Cruz’s ability to buy, possess firearms,” he said. “It had no bearing on what he did on Feb. 14, 2018. So it is immaterial. There’s a lot of room for discussion on the PROMISE program and pre-arrest diversion programs in general, but it has no bearing on the outcome here.”

The commission voted to include several recommendations for PROMISE and other school-based diversion programs around the state, which will be included in its final report, due by the end of the year.

There were some skeptical voices. Max Schachter, whose 14-year-old son Alex was killed in the shooting, asked the school board representative at the meeting, chief academic officer Dan Gohl, why there had been 40 or 50 incidents involving Cruz if that didn’t indicate a problem with the permissiveness of the PROMISE program.

Gohl responded that those were disciplinary incidents, such as swearing at a teacher, that didn’t rise to the level of criminal offenses.

But Schachter questioned what the district had been doing, as Cruz committed infraction after infraction.

“This kid had a lot of problems, and you weren’t helping him,” he said.

Some commissioners expressed concern that PROMISE, in Cruz’s case, was a lost opportunity to intervene. But Gualtieri said there had been extensive attempts to intervene by Henderson Behavioral Services, with many visits to Cruz’s home.

He placed some of the blame on Cruz’s deceased mother, whom he described as an “enabler” who disagreed with an attempt by a mental health counselor to stop him from buying a gun.

The committee voted to make five recommendations for reforming diversion programs such as PROMISE:

-- School-based diversion programs should only be established in collaboration with state attorney’s offices.

-- A common state database should be created so an officer can find out immediately in a young person in one county has committed offenses in another.

-- Diversion criteria should be consistent among Florida’s 67 counties.

-- Students should no longer have their records reset at the end of the year, as Broward allows.

-- Diversion programs should not interfere with the discretion of the law enforcement officer on the spot.